Clause 25
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
3:00 pm
Danny Alexander (Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Work & Pensions; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, Liberal Democrat)
Amendment No. 86 would delete the reference at the end of clause 25 to identity cards issued under the Identity Cards Act 2006. The reason for the amendment is twofold. First, as the Committee knows, my hon. Friends and I object strongly to ID cards and think that they are unnecessary, costly and illiberal—for all those reasons, the legislation should be abolished and ID cards should not be introduced. That is part of a wider debate and may be beyond the scope of the Committee.
Secondly, in much of the Government’s discussions about their reasons for introducing ID cards, it was made clear that Ministers see them as not only a travel authorisation, as they relate to this clause, but as potentially having a much wider use concerning access to public services. When Ministers have talked about ID cards, they have talked about their being used to access services at a doctor’s surgery or school. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Angus has said that that is not the case in Scotland, and he is right. He and I agree on that. [Interruption.] There are more than a few things that we agree about. We are interested in the access to medical services that Scots visiting England might have.
The Minister, in his response to earlier amendments, drew distinctions between different levels of incentive or enforcement action and the different levels of protest that would have to be gone through to secure them. He made the point that a driving licence is necessary for someone to carry out their daily life, particularly their working life, whereas a passport might be largely discretionary. His idea that an ID card should simply be seen as a discretionary travel document seems to go against the arguments that his ministerial colleagues have made in favour of ID cards. ID cards have been presented as much more than that, and they could become pervasive in society given the broad sweep of things that an authoritarian Government—such as the one that we have at the moment—might seek to use them for. Above and beyond my objections in principle, I think that practical reasons suggest that it is utterly inappropriate to refer to ID cards in this Bill.